Ten and still counting

What do you get when you combine "the biggest claims programme in history" with the oldest bureaucracy in history? A 10-year-long queue. Niveen Wahish explores the harrowing world of Gulf War compensations
The queue that permanently populates the Ministry of Labour and Manpower in Nasr City knows no barriers of gender or class. For the past 10 years, men and women, both young and old and representing virtually all social classes, wait for hours, days, even months. They may share little in terms of their everyday lives, but they have one thing in common: they all demand due compensation for harm inflicted on them by the Gulf War.
People hand their passports to an ephemeral face behind a closed door and wait; they may have to return several times before they get an answer. The lucky ones walk away with a valuable slip of paper: a computer printout stating the amount owed to them and information on where to cash their money. Fortunate claimants will be told to come back in a few months to ask when the United Nations Compensations Commission (UNCC) will be sending more funds. The unlucky ones are told they are owed nothing and dismissed with little ceremony. The perpetually closed door is creaked open just long enough to fling the rejected documents at their dumbstruck owners, who scramble desperately to collect them before they are trampled by a new wave of hopefuls.
Welcome to the world of Gulf War compensations in Egypt. This is only the tail end of a much longer and problematic chain of events. Established in 1991 by the UN Security Council, the UNCC was set up to process and verify requests for damages by individuals, corporations, governments and international organisations that suffered losses as a direct result of the 1990-91 Gulf War. Claims are made on behalf of the claimant to the UNCC by the government -- in the case of Egypt, through the Ministry of Labour and Manpower. These claims are then referred by the UNCC secretariat to 14 panels of commissioners. Pending the approval of the UNCC's governing council, the panels then issue recommendations for compensation awards.
The UNCC governing council classifies all claims into one of six categories, labelled "A" through "F". The first three have supposedly been given top priority due to their humanitarian nature. Category A claims allow for the costs of departure from Iraq or Kuwait, category B claims account for death or serious personal injury and category C includes the individual loss of income below $100,000. The rest deal with much larger sums and presumably involve more complicated claims. Category D handles individual losses over $100,000, category E is for corporate losses and category F is for losses sustained by governments and international organisations, including environmental damage.
With some 2.6 million filed applications, processing the claims has been a complex and time-consuming task. Michael Raboin, director and deputy executive-secretary of the UNCC in Geneva, has called the UNCC compensations programme "the biggest claims programme in history," but people still waiting for their check call it a disaster. Raboin, who headed a UNCC delegation to Egypt this month, has had to field accusations that the UNCC has moved too slowly and ultimately caused too many casualties of its own.
The intricate logistics of the claims programme are a mystery to 52-year-old Said Hamed, an Egyptian who was working in Kuwait for seven years before he was forced to flee the war. Hamed is one of the many claimants who say they are the victims of poor handling. Suffering the unemployment crunch in Egypt several years back, Hamed says that his family's cramped living conditions and a lack of job opportunities led him to join the thousands of Egyptian workers who travelled east to oil rich countries of the Gulf in search of money to support their most basic needs. He was working hard, trying the save enough money to build a house back home, when the war struck.
Hamed was forced to return to Egypt with nothing saved and he thought his dream had been shattered for good. News of UN compensation rekindled his hopes for making a new start and he received $2,500 in compensation as a category A applicant, which covers those who fled Kuwait and Iraq between 2 August 1990 and 2 March 1991. Hamed used the money to erect the walls of his prospective home, but he is still awaiting the remainder of his money for a pending category C claim. Although many of his colleagues have received their category C payment, Hamed has been told that he will not receive any more funds. Now working as a driver at a factory in 10 Ramadan City, Hamed has to take time off to manoeuvre the convoluted corridors of the Ministry of Labour trying to find someone to listen to his tale and either explain why his claim has been refused or help him write a petition.
Among the 96 governments that filed for compensation, only Kuwait precedes Egypt as the country most devastated by the Gulf War. Despite the large number of applicants at hand, the commission claims to have handled a good portion of their toughest work. According to the UNCC's Raboin, all the work for categories A, B and C has been completed and all the money should have been received by the appropriate governments. The Egyptian government concedes that a good deal of the money awarded under the first three categories has been received in Egypt, but, not surprisingly, distributing the claims is by no means straightforward.
According to Omayma Ezzeddin, of the decision support department in the Ministry of Labour, Egypt has received over $1.5 billion for categories A and C, which presumably covers the claims of almost 300,000 individuals filing for category A and over 87,000 individuals under category C. Category B claims, which Ezzeddin says amounted to around $1.3 million, were "paid a long time ago." Despite the huge sums of money provided, the ministry has suffered under the strain of handling all the claims and not all the money received has even been distributed. After so much time and confusion, some claimants have not come forward to collect their money, while others are revealed to have duplicate claims (members of the same family are only compensated once).
With so many claimants to find, the UNCC governing council gives Egypt up to 12 months to find due claimants and deliver their money. After a year, what has not been distributed is returned to Geneva, accompanied by a report. If someone is later located, the money is sent for. This is the case with Egypt at the moment, explains Raboin. There are $118 million ready to be disbursed among Egyptian claimants, but the commission is still waiting for the reports.
But after a decade of promises, such explanations offer little comfort for the claimants who have stood helplessly in line at the ministry. Dalal Abul-Ela and her husband were living and working in Kuwait for 17 years before the war broke out. In 1991 she applied for compensation, but 10 years later, she has yet to receive anything. Initially, Abul-Ela was told that both she and her husband would receive compensation under category A, which allots $2,500 to each individual and $5,500 to those accompanied by their dependents. Under this explanation, Dalal and her husband are entitled to a combined sum of $8,000.
Several years down the line, however, ministry officials have told the Abul-Elas that they will only receive $3,000, because only one member of the family can cash a claim. "They should have refused our original claim then," Abul-Ela says. "If that was the case, we would have stuck with my husband's claim, which was worth $5,500." The strain of the past 10 years was visible on Abul-Ela's face as she worked up her outrage; although she is in her late 30s, she appears over 40. "I have been eating my heart out because we are not being given what is so obviously our right," she said.
Abul-Ela is among the many displaced and impoverished victims of the war who wander between ministry offices looking for answers. She is certain that compensations have been disbursed haphazardly, drawing on numerous cases similar to hers that have gone another way. "I too had a job in Kuwait, for which I should have been compensated," she says angrily. The press has carried the story of such unfortunate claimants for years. A weekly TV programme recently took the ministry to task because they had received the full files of hundreds of applicants who complained they had been denied their money. For all those people scraping their documents off the floor in front of a slammed door, the only explanation is that a scam in the millions of dollars can only be afoot.
Ministry officials counter that they are overwhelmed by the immense number of people that descend on the ministry's offices every day. "We go through hundreds of passports daily to check if these people are due any money," explains Ezzedin. Other officials complain that their load is unduly exacerbated by the people who keep coming back after they have been told they are not owed anything. "A lot of hard work is being done here," says Raboin, coming to the rescue. "Considering the staggering numbers here, they [the Egyptian government] are doing very well."
Bureaucracy aside, the public still firmly believes that the ministry could have done a better -- and faster -- job. Other Arab countries have already finished handing out compensations, but Egypt lags behind, still sifting through paperwork. Raboin explains that other countries, like Jordan, were simply easier because the number of claims were nothing compared to Egypt.
And, of course, there are all the other claims. Aside from the individual category C claims, the Egyptian government also presented a consolidated claim on behalf of workers who were working in Iraq before the war broke and who, because of the outbreak of hostilities, have been unable to cash their remittances from the branches and correspondents of Iraqi banks in Egypt. The consolidated claim was worth $491 million, due to the almost 900,000 individuals involved. Of those, only 220,000 have been successful. "This is because the UNCC approved only the claims dating between 2 July 1990 and July 1991, which amounted to around $84 million," explains El-Sayed El-Ashri, assistant manager of the Arab African International Bank, a correspondent bank to Iraqi banks. "Disbursement of these began in April 1999 and continued for a year," El-Ashri said, adding that only a limited number failed to show up and collect their money. "The rest who are owed money that is not covered by the UNCC will have to wait until Iraqi assets are released and the country can pay back its dues."
Egyptian government claims are so problematic that the difficulties caused Raboin to lead a UNCC delegation to Egypt this month. Among the authorities claiming category F compensation are the Civil Aviation Authority, which is demanding LE9 million and the Ministry of Defence, which is claiming $109 million. The delegation paid visits to numerous relevant authorities to investigate the claims. "These claims are basically costs that were incurred by the government in evacuating Egyptians at the time of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, as well as damage done to the diplomatic and consular properties in Kuwait and Iraq," said Raboin. Decisions regarding government claims are scheduled for December.
Raboin explained that a lot of the company claims that fall under category E are in fact outside the UNCC's jurisdiction, because they relate to business transactions with Iraq pre-dating the invasion. Many Egyptian companies are owed money for goods that they had exported to Iraq, but Raboin says that a lot of these claims filed by companies are considered "old debt." The Iraqi government had argued that it would pay its dues once its assets have been released by the UN.
When the commission commenced its work, it had to depend solely on Iraqi frozen assets and the countries that owed Iraq money for funds. UN Security Council Resolution 986 -- the so-called oil-for-food programme -- now allows Iraq to export oil in order to meet the humanitarian needs of its people. Some 30 per cent of the proceeds of these sales were channelled into the UNCC and so far the UNCC has received and distributed just under $12 billion. Iraqi production was quite high last fall and "we were getting in some months as much as $400 million a month -- that's why we caught up with the payments," says Raboin. He pointed out that the high oil prices of last year also helped raise funds.
A new agreement reached in New York last September reduces the UNCC cut of oil profits to 25 per cent. This will continue until June. By then, if the embargo is lifted and Iraq can sell as much oil as it wishes without restrictions, the mechanism is that the sale will still take place via the UN, thus ensuring that the UNCC gets its percentage. Raboin is hopeful that the commission will be able to finish off its work by 2003.
The wheels are in motion, but for most people, it's all coming far too late. Smooth redirection of funds and tidy classification systems utterly ignore the humanitarian side of the decade-long quest for promised compensation -- and fail to account for the numerous people slighted by the system. In the meantime, Egyptians continue to queue up for the coveted printout; an IOU that recaptures the dream they must have had years ago when they embarked on a fated journey beyond Egyptian borders.
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